The following notes on Lancelot du Lac were written by Pate Duncan, PhD student in the Department of Communication Arts at UW-Madison. A recently restored 4K DCP of Lancelot will screen at the Cinematheque on Friday, October 18 at 7 p.m. Location is 4070 Vilas Hall, 821 University Ave. Admission is free!

By Pate Duncan

In 1974, after two decades of trying to get the film made, enigmatic auteur Robert Bresson released his ascetic Arthurian adaptation, Lancelot du Lac, to international acclaim. Bresson, known for adaptations and the brisk, minimal style he imposed upon the source material, based this film off the anonymous 13th century French text La Mort le Roi Artu (The Death of Arthur). The film centers on the titular Lancelot (Luc Simon, one of Bresson’s many “models” or non-professional actors, though the role would’ve gone to Burt Lancaster if not for a scheduling issue) as he feuds with his fellow knight Mordred (Patrick Bernhard), serves his King Arthur (Vladimir Antolek-Oresek), and services Queen Guinevere (Laura Duke Condominas) in an emotionally fraught and dangerous love affair. Beginning and ending with images of bloody spurts seeping into forest floors, Lancelot is a violent entry in Bresson’s oeuvre that develops his sparse form, typifies the cruel stories of his color period, and presages the final violence that ends his final film, L’Argent (1983). Lancelot is Bresson’s eighth adaptation, his third color film, but only his second period piece.

Though known for his nigh-monastic auteur persona, Robert Bresson’s filmmaking career points back to bohemian days with 1930s French Surrealists, rubbing elbows with Jean Cocteau and Jean Aurenche before finding his way into fashion photography for French couturier Cartier., according to scholar Colin Burnett. Bresson’s experience creating refined, elegant promotional material had a greater influence on his style than his avant-garde affinities. Bresson then founded an independent production company in the decentralized film economy of 1930s France, beginning his career with the comedy Les affaires publiques (Public Affairs, 1934). Later, his engagement in the French ciné-club ecosystem gave him another cinephilic scene, even as he experimented with a style of radical minimalism that set him apart from both his older contemporaries Jean Renoir and Jacques Tati as well as up-and-coming filmmakers of the French New Wave.

Contemporary audiences will likely be more familiar with Bresson’s earlier features from around the same period as the French New Wave, give or take a few years on either side. A Man Escaped (1956), Pickpocket (1959), and Au Hasard Balthazar (1966) remain among Bresson’s most popular films with audiences today, and all are significant examples of Bresson’s stringent style and solemn tone. Paul Schrader, one of Bresson’s most devout acolytes, explains the master’s style succinctly: “Bresson’s everyday stylization consists in elimination rather than addition or assimilation. Bresson ruthlessly strips action of its significance: he regards a scene in terms of its fewest possibilities.” It is with this ruthlessness in mind that Bresson is frequently invoked as a paradigm case of a challenging filmmaker, one whose films—in spite of their fairly speedy average runtimes—demand that we adopt viewing skills germane to their subtly modulated intrinsic norms. This is to say nothing of their enigmatic thematic concerns which, as Burnett notes, have been read for, paradoxically, both their opaque metaphysical preoccupations and their sensuous—even erotic—materiality. All of this is to say that Bresson remains puzzling even for us eggheads in the room.

Kristin Thompson helps us understand the appeal of such challenging material as a fundamentally playful aesthetic exercise with Lancelot as a prime example of sparse parametric form. Thompson notes that the film features a kind of modular, bilaterally symmetrical plot of variant and variable scenes that rhyme in their use of various devices and plot actions. The film’s structure is something like that of a horseshoe, bringing to mind the scene, late in the film, in which a young peasant child bows her head against the hoofprint of Lancelot’s steed and prays for his safety. This symmetrical organization turns on the fulcrum of the film’s dazzling tournament scene, a baring of such pared down parameters that its play of repetition and variation evokes music more than film, repeating only the word “Lancelot” for the entire sequence. Even Bresson himself remarked that the scene “is edited almost entirely for the ear.”

Playful editing is one of Bresson’s most renowned formal flourishes. Throughout the film, graphic matches and ambiguous spatial relations (owing to Bresson’s trademark lack of establishing shots in his films) complicate narrative comprehension in what would be in the hands of another director a fairly straightforward and classical knight’s tale. Bresson plays with the ambiguity of tent backdrops, colorful but ultimately meaningless flags, and screen direction and eyelines to deform this centuries-old fable into a modernist exercise in the cineaste’s sui generis style. Thompson elsewhere suggests a purely graphic quality in the film’s mise-en-scène, where Mondrian-like fields of color and reflective armor clash like the knights themselves. Thompson notes that the armor is “a costuming substance that makes the figures like chameleons, changing their fit to their environment—yet in no case do the suits of armor add strong color to the scene.”

The armor’s presence also allows Bresson to further develop his minimally expressive figure behavior, as his models’ faces and bodies are often obscured and only differentiated by distinct tights and helms. Such restraint counterintuitively heightens the importance of even the smallest of movements and makes the film’s inclusion of faces stand out in stark relief against Bresson’s impenetrable armored heads, dorsal framing of human figures, and framing of horses at the same scale and angle as their human riders. Bresson’s eye for composition and subtle reframing is striking, as charged with self-consciousness as the just-so iconography of an ominous Tarot draw, with Schrader calling this style “a frozen form which expresses the Transcendent—a movie hierophany.” Keep an eye out for these surprising pops of color in this otherwise quite dark film, as well as pinprick glints shining off reflective armor and figures moving rhythmically in the backgrounds of shots. These elements add a graphic complexity and aesthetic texture whose regularity and materiality temper Bresson’s somber thematic material and heady philosophical concerns.

Of course, it can be taxing on a viewer to play along with all of Bresson’s parametric peacocking, especially on a first watch. It’s for that reason that his films have rewarded careful study and inspired impassioned criticism. Few filmmakers can boast inspiring such critical enantiodromia, working as a case study for both Schrader’s transcendental formalism and the more materialist example of David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson’s elaboration of sparse parametric narration. Bresson resolves the antinomies of seemingly incompatible opposites, uniting spirit and flesh, heaven and earth, eternity and present. His work continues to fascinate viewers and scholars even as we move further into his dense, cultivated mystique.

The following notes on Sohrab Shahid Saless' Far from Home (aka Dar Ghorbat and Im Der Fremde) were written by Nâlân Erbil, Teaching Faculty in the Department of German, Nordic and Slavic+ at UW Madison. Far from Home screened at the Cinematheque on Friday, October 11, 2025, Presented with the support of the Kemal H. Karpat Center for Turkish Studies at UW-Madison.

By Nâlân Erbil

“Ghorbat” is untranslatable to English and evidently to German in one word as the translated titles Far from Home and In der Fremde suggest respectively. Loaned from Arabic (ﻏﺮﺑﺖ) to Persian (ﻏﺮﺑﺖ) and to Turkish (gurbet), “ghorbat” means “existential state of being away from home.” A simple bilingual dictionary search of the term dar ghorbat will lead to “in exile” or “far from home” (as in the English title) or “in a foreign country” in the German version, all of which fail to capture the complexity inherent in the word ghorbat, including physical location, emotions, and mental state among others. Even with this difficulty, the film manages to transmit the isolation embedded in ghorbat to the audience through acting and cinematography.

Multiple scenes in the factory setting show the protagonist, the “guest” worker (Gastarbeiter) Hüseyin/Husseyin (Parviz Sayyad), working a monotonously robotic job. The film begins and ends with Husseyin operating what seems like a steel cutting machine that produces an irritatingly extreme noise, a loud noise that shocks the audience before they can see the image producing it.  Diligently saving his wages, Husseyin hopes to one day marry and buy a house back home, but his immediate future in Berlin is clouded by indignities he suffers at the hands of racist coworkers and painfully failed attempts at romance.

We rarely see Husseyin verbally communicating with his ethnic German co-workers. The only two instances we hear him talking at work is with a fellow worker from the same hometown and with an ethnic German clearly making fun of his eating during lunch break. Husseyin gullibly smiles and praises the food having no clue about being humiliated. A similar scene takes place when another occupant in the apartment building where he lives with other co-workers, an elderly and lonely ethnic German woman, invites him for coffee. This is also the first instance where both of these characters are attempting to communicate; earlier, Husseyin’s greetings to the woman go unanswered. She offers Husseyin coffee and snacks and shows a photo of her son who allegedly abandoned her. Husseyin, again, doesn’t understand a word of what she says and repeats “yes, yes (ja, ja)” and “good man; good man” when she tells him her son is only after her money. Such failed communication underpins the overarching theme of the film: the utter isolation of “guest” workers outside the doors of their communal apartment. No genuine communication with ethnic Germans is possible due to lack of language proficiency and perceived lower socio-economic class that these workers belong to.

One of the most celebrated filmmakers in Iranian cinema, Sohrab Shahid-Saless directed Far From Home at a pivotal period in his own life, as he transitioned from Iran to living and working in Berlin, where he would go on to shoot thirteen films over the next sixteen years. Shadid-Saless seems to have used a real worker apartment building in West Berlin, akin to tenements in NYC that house multiple workers and their families. Husseyin’s first entrance to the apartment building takes us to almost complete darkness as the windows of the first floor are closed off with what seems like wood-panels. The interior of the apartment building is dimly lit and has crumbling wall paint, but the worst is spared for the interior of Husseyin’s dwelling, an apartment/dorm that is divided into multiple units without a proper layout. It can be seen from the abundance of mold on the walls that there is limited ventilation inside the unit. The apartment/dorm is rendered claustrophobic with multiple people sharing a small space in close shots.

It takes effort to not compare Shahid-Saless’s Dar Ghorbat (1975) to Fassbinder’s Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974). While the former focuses singularly on “guest” workers, in Ali the ethnic German cleaning woman Emmy’s isolation is as important to the plot as the title character’s outsider status, if not more. In this way, Fassbinder succeeds in revealing the hypocrisy of ethnic German family and friends who abandon Emmy because she marries Ali. Arguably, one of the pitfalls of Dar Ghorbat is the potential to enforce stereotypes, unlike in Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, by depicting the “guest” workers as uneducated crudes incapable of forging meaningful communication even among themselves, let alone with ethnic-Germans, who apparently see them as lesser human beings at work, on the train, and as neighbors in the same apartment building. One can almost sense justification in ethnic-German’s discriminatory attitude when Husseyin and the other “guest” workers are framed as gullible types who internalize their inferiority. For example, a roommate worker brings an ethnic German girlfriend to the communal apartment, and everyone’s attitude towards him shifts from being seen as nuisance who constantly borrows money to a respectable one.

The only woman with whom the workers are in close proximity is the wife of a “guest” worker who is responsible for all the domestic work in the dorm/apartment full of single men. We don’t even recall her name since she is indirectly referred to only when food or tea is needed. If one is not informed about the history of worker migration from Turkey to West Germany, a viewer of Dar Ghorbat might think that only male workers made the journey West, which is far from the truth. Women were recruited in comparable numbers as men, and they lived in similar dorm/apartments with fellow women workers (my own grandmother was among the first groups to be recruited circa 1963). Similarly, they worked in factories throughout the day and attended to their domestic and public life during their time off. The Turkish film Almanya Acı Vatan (1979) (The Bitter Land) by Şerif Gören provides a shift in focus to the women workers from Turkey in West Berlin. Almanya Acı Vatan, in contrast to Dar Ghorbat, shows its woman protagonist Güldane having both high intelligence, perseverance, and agency, albeit hailing from a village in Turkey.

Post WWII workers to West Germany from East and Southern Europe, and “contract” workers to East Germany from Mozambique, Vietnam, China, and Algeria, among others, rebuilt Germany’s economy without much acknowledgement to date. Even with its limitations, Dar Ghorbat provides valuable insights depicting the precarious everyday lives of former “guest” workers whose ghorbat will continue haunting Germany.

The following notes on part one of Roberto Rossellini's L’Amore, La Voce Humana, were written by John Bennett, PhD candidate in the Department of Communication Arts at UW Madison. A restored DCP of La Voce Humana from the Cineteca di Bologna will be shown on Saturday, September 28 at 2 p.m. in the Cinematheque's regular sceening space, 4070 Vilas Hall, 821 University Ave. The screening will be followed by a discussion with filmmaker Nancy Savoca. Admission is free!

By John Bennett

In the immediate postwar period of Italian cinema, Roberto Rossellini was undoubtedly the most renowned practitioner of what was known as “Italian neorealist” cinema. Neorealist films—such as Open City (1945), Rossellini’s enormously successful depiction of war-ravaged Rome—were notable for their stories and styles that captured the hardships of World War II and its aftermath in Italy with a documentary texture. With Open City, Paisan (1946) and Germany, Year Zero (1948), Rossellini established himself as a the most prominent member of a cohort of directors that included Vittorio de Sica, Luchino Visconti, Alberto Lattuada, and Giuseppe de Santis—all of whom made films with a certain realist grit that was, at the time, a rather novel development in world cinema. By the late 1940s and early 1950s, as the Italian economic boom began to cauterize the wounds of war, most of these directors began to drift toward a more psychological and heightened brand of filmmaking. No film is more representative of the earliest movement of this drift than The Human Voice, Rossellini’s 1948 short film.

The story of The Human Voice is simple: a woman (Anna Magnani, whom Rossellini had helped bring to international prominence with Open City) languishes in her dark and cluttered apartment as she has a final despairing telephone conversation with an invisible ex-lover. Rossellini’s choice in source material for The Human Voice is the surest sign of his break from neorealism; he drew from a theatrical piece by French writer, artist and filmmaker Jean Cocteau. If Rossellini was one of the great champions of cinematic realism, Cocteau was a master of poetic filmic fancy. His Beauty and the Beast (1946), with its enchanted castles, magic mirrors and hexed princes, seems the antithesis of the grim and gritty collection of stories in Rossellini’s Paisan, which was released the same year. Yet in treating this material, Rossellini anticipates the more psychological cinema that would interest him throughout the 1950s in the films he made with screen legend Ingrid Bergman. The Human Voice, a story of love on the rocks, directly anticipates a film like Journey to Italy, a Rossellini/Bergman collaboration about the deterioration of a bourgeois marriage.

For a portmanteau feature entitled L’Amore, The Human Voice was paired with a second short film, Il miracolo (The Miracle). Rossellini helms this film as well, with Anna Magnani playing Nannina, a religious peasant who encounters a rakish man whom she takes as an apparition of St. Joseph. The man (played by none other than Federico Fellini, on whose idea the film was based) plies Nannina with wine until she passes out. When she discovers, weeks later, that she is pregnant, she tragically attributes the pregnancy to divine intervention but faces social ostracization from her conservative community. The result of this diptych of films is a pure showcase for Magnani’s range. The Human Voice allows her to be sullen, plaintive and agonized, while she demonstrates her ability to play a naïve and odd outsider in Il miracolo.

Indeed, a title card to Il miracolo, signed by Rossellini, proudly proclaims that “this film is an homage to the art of Anna Magnani.” In The Human Voice, that art is on the fullest display. Present in nearly every shot of the film, Magnani manages to give her character an arc of increasing frenzy and despair as last grains of sand fall away in the hourglass of her love affair with the unseen man. Magnani was a performer who made excess a virtue. Frequent close-ups allow us to see the control with which Magnani manipulates her expressions: her eyes widen in despair at times and shiftily dart left and right with suspicion at others, and well-timed teardrops punctuate the sentences of her conversation. Veneers of barely maintained calm slip away each time she fears that the line has been disconnected, illustrating the swiftness with which she could shift the intensity and aspect of her demeanor as a performer. As she grows more distraught over the dwindling minutes of communication with the man she loves, Magnani clutches with operatic desperation at the apartment’s curtains, just as she writhes with increasing convulsion amid her unmade bedding. Towards the end of the film, she distractedly bunches the telephone cord around her face and mouth, threatening to literalize “chewing the scenery” as an idiom. Though it runs a mere 35 minutes, The Human Voice gives one as palpable a sense of the grandeur and physicality of Magnani’s performance style as any of her feature length films.

On another level, The Human Voice reflected and anticipated elements of the personal lives of Rossellini and Magnani. In Tag Gallagher’s lengthy biography, The Adventures of Roberto Rossellini, he traces the romance that began between the two titans of Italian cinema from the mid-40s through its conclusion around the time of the production of 1950’s Stromboli. Around this time, Magnani anticipated making an American film with Rossellini about Italian immigrants in New York. Rossellini instead turned his attention to Stromboli, which starred Ingrid Bergman—an actress who replaced Magnani in Rossellini’s projects as well as his affections (Bergman and Rossellini married shortly after Stromboli’s release). Though The Human Voice marked the end of her collaboration with Rossellini, Magnani’s career continued to flourish: she went on to find global success delivering the same kind of thunderous, earthy, swaggering expressivity in films like Jean Renoir’s The Golden Coach (1952), Sidney Lumet’s The Fugitive Kind (1960), Mario Monicelli’s The Passionate Thief (1960), and Daniel Mann’s The Rose Tattoo (1955), for which she won an Academy Award for Best Actress.

The Human Voice marked the first adaptation of Cocteau’s play. Yet since Rossellini’s inaugural adaptation, the piece has proven to be a perennial exercise for actresses. Ironically, Ingrid Bergman would go on to play the same role nine years after the dissolution of her marriage to Rossellini in a 1966 television adaptation (directed, somewhat incongruously, by Ted Kotcheff of First Blood fame). Sophia Loren played an older version of Magnani’s character in another Italian adaptation directed by Edoardo Ponti in 2014. The spareness of the material proved conducive to filming during the COVID-19 pandemic and Tilda Swinton became the Woman on the Phone for legendary Spanish director Pedro Almodovar in 2020. Scattered among these notable versions are innumerable iterations of the material, whether they be foreign television broadcasts, filmed theatrical productions, or independent calling cards. Nevertheless, one can assume that, with each new adaptation, directors and actresses refer back to the sense languor and lovesick agony that Rossellini and Magnani so skillfully conjured.

The following notes on Chen Kaige's Farewell, My Concubine were written by Dr. David Vanden Bossche, alumnus of the Department of Communications Arts at UW-Madison. A new, restored DCP of the international version of Farewell, My Concubine will screen at the Cinematheque on Saturday, September 14 at 7 p.m. in our regular venue, 4070 Vilas, 821 University Ave. Admission is free!

By David Vanden Bossche

The winner of the Palme d'Or at 1993’s Cannes Film Festival (an honor it shared with Jane Campion’s The Piano), Farewell, My Concubine is a nearly three-hour epic spanning half a century of Chinese history, but at the same time an intimate story of two men who spend their lives performing at the famous Beijing Opera. This sumptuous visual feast is also the magnum opus in the oeuvre of Chen Kaige, whose own life shows striking parallels with some of the movie’s narrative. Sixteen during the cultural revolution, the young director turned his father, also a film director, over to the revolutionaries. Though father and son later reconciled (the senior Chen oversaw the art direction for Concubine), the guilt of this betrayal would haunt Chen for decades, influencing his honest portrayal of the cultural revolution in the film.

The film’s release history has also been a struggle between competing pressures, namely the Chinese government and its distributor, Miramax. Though the film was banned in China immediately after its release, its win at Cannes spurred international outcry for the Chinese government to back down and let the film back into theaters. Eventually the authorities agreed to release the film after 14 minutes had been cut, including scenes dealing with the Cultural Revolution and homosexuality, with the ending revised to match censorial demands. Miramax’s Harvey Weinstein then picked up Concubine for U.S. and U.K. distribution and also demanded cuts to the film: removing twenty minutes that filled out portions of the relationship between the two men. This is the version that has been widely available, though it was panned by the Cannes jury that awarded the original prize. Eventually, Miramax released the original cut of the film on DVD, and in 2023 Film Movement released a 4K restoration of the uncut original: the first time it’s been seen in U.S. theaters and the version screening at the Cinematheque.

Politics notwithstanding, this is also undeniably Chen’s most accomplished work stylistically; every shot and camera movement in Farewell, My Concubine reflects the refinement and precise execution of the operatic rituals and tableaus that occupy such a central place in the movie’s narrative. The story opens in the 1920s, depicting the brutal training required for little boys to become actors, focusing on Duan and Cheng, both of whom become entwined with their theatrical roles in the film’s titular opera. Duan always incarnates a mythic ruler and Cheng plays - as was the tradition - the female concubine who ends the opera committing suicide in a gesture of love. We witness their long careers throughout several decades, watching the actors rise from poverty to stardom. Fame nevertheless requires them to navigate the sometimes rapidly changing political landscape of China, bringing with it powerful new allies and benefactors of the theatre but also creating new adversaries and often the need to begrudgingly seek out the favors of powerful politicians and military rulers. Undergirding all this is the complicated relationship between the lifelong friends and scene partners (although they often find themselves on opposing sides), a relationship that is tainted by the harsh realities of life but also enriched by the unbreakable bond that comes from incarnating two famous lovers on stage.

Among the story’s most controversial elements in 1993 for Chen Kaige’s Chinese audience and censors were the clear homoerotic implications of the two men’s relationship and the ways their roles begin to blur the lines between performance and real life. The film’s homoerotic undertones are further complicated and reinforced by the presence of a woman who drives a wedge between the two men, a complicated, yet subtle love triangle developing. Gong Li plays the prostitute-turned-muse, Juxian, who becomes a pivotal element in both the strained relationship between the two actors and the negotiation of historic political turmoil. While he has often been seen as a politically critical voice whose work was regularly censored by national authorities, in more recent years and in the leadup to the 2000 Beijing Olympics, the Chinese government softened their approach to the director. Similarly, Chen Kaige has agreed in recent decades to direct semi-propaganda films commissioned for the Chinese government andThe Battle at Lake Changjin (2021) became China’s highest-grossing film of all time.

Somehow balancing an expansive view of Chinese history with an intimate character study, Farewell, My Concubine manages to not only work as an intense melodrama, but also as a dark political tale on the messy process of regime change. The movie boldly suggests that the politically empowered, whether on the left or right of the political spectrum, will ultimately turn against art and intellectualism, a message as relevant for the cultural revolution as it is still decades later. However, the film’s ultimate message is of uplift, suggesting that art and expression outlast any political upheaval, no matter how hard those in power attempt to destroy or limit its power to provoke, to reflect, or to stir the human spirit.